Amazon Insists Publishers Use Their On-Demand Printer

Lawrence Person writes "According to a story up on Writer's Weekly, Print on Demand publishers are being told to use Amazon's own BookSurge POD printer or else Amazon will disable the 'buy' button for their books. After hemming and hawing, an Amazon/BookSurge rep 'finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives... their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.' So much for Amazon's Vision Statement: 'Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.'"

Comments

Re:Amazon is just like all the rest....

[Rakishi]

I think you misunderstand. A traditional publisher only accepts those books that meet certain standards of writing quality. This includes, but is not limited to proper spelling, grammar, syntax and appropriate use of the language. It also, probably, includes minimizing the use of the passive voice and advancing the story by showing what happens instead of telling the reader. POD companies, OTOH, accept whatever the writer wants put into print except, in most cases, hate literature. A traditional publisher will work with the writer to correct any flaws in the manuscript and in some cases require scenes to be rewritten, while a POD company simply takes camera ready copy and puts it out. I'm not saying that there aren't good books to be found in the POD lineups -- Piers Anthony has put his entire backlist out via Xlibris -- but the average quality is poor by comparison to that put out by companies who pick and choose their product. You point being? If someone wants to put out a quality book with a POD they simply need to pay someone to do the editing for them. The same is already done with regular self-publishing I believe so it's not exactly uncommon. Likewise vanity presses don't even do much more than dump the book onto the market.

The grandparents point was that the selection part isn't necessary and the number of quality works isn't going to be smaller, possibly. The difference is in who gets you decide what works are quality and what are not.

As far as your not needing a publisher to decide what's good and what's not, last year's National November Novel Writing Contest had 15,335 winners. I doubt that as many as 1% were readable, let alone worth publishing. Would you like to wade through that huge pile of dross looking for the few nuggets of gold? I certainly wouldn't, and I was one of them. No, I'll let literary agents and editors do that for me, TYVM! You mean you actually like every single book published by a major publishing company and read every single one? Or do you have some third party help you select the ones to read instead? I mean I find most of the stuff published to be crap, for my tastes that is, so it'd be sort of idiotic for me to read all of it. Actually I'd be surprised if I'd enjoy even 1% of the books published by any major publisher.

Why should I trust a couple of random people who don't share my tastes? This isn't the 1800s, we can communicate now in an organized and global scale. We have machines to combine information from millions of people to tell you what you'd like based on what they liked. I don't need to wade through all the stuff, I can instead let the hundreds of thousand of other people do it for me. I may take a look at a couple of them for the hell of it but if enough people do so as well then it adds up. I don't even need to find the quality ones now, I can simply let the good ones filter through till they reach me. It's not like most of the stuff I read right now was published after my birth much less this year so it doesn't much matter to me.